Supply chains exist in many of today's business practices where goods or services are provided or used by several different participants. For example, a supply chain can be defined from a manufacturer of a product, through one or more intermediary actors or agents, and to a retail agent that sells the manufactured product. The intermediaries can include transport agents, distributors, wholesalers, and others.
A supply chain is often defined as a first step to better monitor the circumstances surrounding a company's business that relates to a distributed product. For example, a planning manager of a manufacturer needs access to information about the actors that participate in a supply chain for a given product. There exists systems for managing supply-chain information, for example those made by SAP AG in Walldorf (Baden) Germany. Moreover, the increasing use of radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology in all stages of the supply chain means that real-time data for tracking items becomes abundant.
However, existing supply-chain management systems may have disadvantages. For example, they may not provide a good visual representation of the supply chain in a graphical user interface (GUI) of the supply-chain management system. One consequence of this is that it may be difficult for the user to obtain a good overview of the supply chain. For example, the lack of an overview presentation may be significant for the planning manager. Also, existing systems may rely on information that is updated only once a day or less often, which means that there is no real-time view of developments in the supply chain.